Category Archives: Medicine

This is your brain on drugs, or, more specifically, how three different psychedelic drugs, psilocybin [‘shrooms]. LSD, and ketamine [“Special K”], as revealed in a new scientific study revealing that psychedelics trigger neuronal excitement in specific brain areas, as reported in Nature [open access], the world’s premiere scientific journal [click on the image to enlarge]:

We’ve long been fascinated with a certain class of drugs, the so-called psychedelics [from the Greek for mind-manifesting], drugs taken not to numb or physically stimulate but to reveal normally hidden dimensions of our inner mental lives.

New research is revealing that psychedelics may be the one reliable route to relieving depression [previously], a condition with which esnl has struggled for most of our years on the planet, as well as stopping smoking and even reducing spousal abuse.

Scientific evidence of a ‘higher’ state of consciousness has been found in a study led by the University of Sussex.

Neuroscientists observed a sustained increase in neural signal diversity – a measure of the complexity of brain activity – of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, compared with when they were in a normal waking state.

The diversity of brain signals provides a mathematical index of the level of consciousness. For example, people who are awake have been shown to have more diverse neural activity using this scale than those who are asleep.

This, however, is the first study to show brain-signal diversity that is higher than baseline, that is higher than in someone who is simply ‘awake and aware’. Previous studies have tended to focus on lowered states of consciousness, such as sleep, anaesthesia, or the so-called ‘vegetative’ state.

The team say that more research is needed using more sophisticated and varied models to confirm the results but they are cautiously excited.

Professor Anil Seth, Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, said: “This finding shows that the brain-on-psychedelics behaves very differently from normal.

“During the psychedelic state, the electrical activity of the brain is less predictable and less ‘integrated’ than during normal conscious wakefulness – as measured by ‘global signal diversity’.

“Since this measure has already shown its value as a measure of ‘conscious level’, we can say that the psychedelic state appears as a higher ‘level’ of consciousness than normal – but only with respect to this specific mathematical measure.”

For the study, Michael Schartner, Dr Adam Barrett and Professor Seth of the Sackler Centre reanalysed data that had previously been collected by Imperial College London and the University of Cardiff in which healthy volunteers were given one of three drugs known to induce a psychedelic state: psilocybin, ketamine and LSD.

Using brain imaging technology, they measured the tiny magnetic fields produced in the brain and found that, across all three drugs, this measure of conscious level – the neural signal diversity – was reliably higher.

Republicans in Congress said they lacked the votes needed for passage of their U.S. healthcare system overhaul and a key committee chairman came out in opposition after Donald Trump demanded a vote on Friday in a gamble that could hobble his presidency.

Amid a chaotic scramble for votes, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, who has championed the bill, met with Trump at the White House. Ryan told the president there were not enough votes to pass the plan, U.S. media reported.

If the bill is defeated, Democratic former President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, the 2010 Affordable Care Act dubbed Obamacare, would remain in place despite seven years of Republican promises to dismantle it.

Repealing and replacing Obamacare was a top campaign promise by Trump in the 2016 presidential election, as well as by most Republican candidates, “from dog catcher on up,” as White House spokesman Sean Spicer put it during a briefing on Friday.

The showdown on the House floor follows Trump’s decision to cut off negotiations to shore up support inside his own party, with moderates and the most conservative lawmakers balking. On Thursday night he had issued an ultimatum that lawmakers pass the legislation that has his backing or keep in place the Obamacare law that Republicans have sought to dismantle since it was enacted seven years ago.

And a new Reuters/Ipsos poll reveals the reason for their reluctance [click on the image to enlarge]:

The Republicans are confronted with a harsh reality: Even those who voted for the short-fingered vulgarian, most notably those poorer heartland folks who voted for him are reluctant to inflict higher costs and even lack of emergency room access and maternity care on themselves,m their families, and their friends.

House Republicans, looking for a deal to secure their health care legislation, may scrap one of the Affordable Care Act’s most important consumer protections: requiring individual health insurers to cover ten essential health benefits.

The benefits are:

Pediatric services, including oral and dental care

Pregnancy, maternity and newborn care

Outpatient care

Emergency services

Hospitalization

Prescription drugs

Mental health and substance abuse services

Laboratory services

Rehabilitative services

Prevention services and chronic disease management

Without the mandatory coverage of essential benefits, the health law’s limits on out-of-pocket spending would be “essentially meaningless” because it applies only to those essential services, according to a blog post on Thursday by Timothy Jost, an Emeritus law professor at Washington and Lee University.

The health law’s ban on annual and lifetime coverage limits also applies only to essential benefits, meaning they too would be eliminated under the still-evolving GOP bill.

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Back when esnl was in knee-pants, members of the healthcare professions were adamantly opposed to government involvement in their bailiwick, with doctors especially deriding government involvement in the insurance racket as nothing less than [horrors] socialized medicine!.

Doctors in particular could be relief on by the GOP as reliably in their pocket.

But no more.

Consider the just-announced declarations of war from three healthcare alliances, allergists, psychologists, and nurses.

The American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI) are gravely concerned about the impact President Trump’s proposed budget, released earlier today, will have on the future of medical research. We call on Congress to reject the proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and instead, build on the commitment made last year to begin increasing spending for medical research.

The President’s budget blueprint recommends significant, largely unspecified, cuts to the budget of the NIH. In total, the proposed reduction would amount to approximately 20 percent of the NIH’s entire budget.

ACAAI president Stephen A. Tilles, MD and AAAAI president David B. Peden, MD said the following upon learning of the proposed cuts: “Although the budget blueprint released by President Trump earlier today is short on specifics, it is hard to imagine how cuts of this magnitude could be accomplished without doing serious harm to the core mission of the NIH – medical research. Together, we call upon Congress to reject any cuts to the NIH that would decrease the NIH’s ability to conduct life-saving medical research and training.”

NIH, and in particular the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) are providing vital funding for medical research that could lead to life-improving treatments for individuals suffering from allergies, asthma, immunologic disorders and infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS, emerging and reemerging infectious diseases).

Each year, billions of dollars are spent treating the causes and symptoms of food, drug and skin allergy, immunodeficiency, and asthma. Through the work of NIAID, NHLBI and NIEHS and the research they are funding, we have the opportunity to identify and develop life-saving and life-improving treatments for these widespread chronic conditions.

This past October, NIAID researchers announced promising results from an NIH sponsored clinical trial on the efficacy and value of an intervention for treating children and young adults with peanut allergies. This January a NIAID sponsored expert panel issued clinical guidelines to help health care providers give parents and caregivers important information on early introduction of peanut-containing foods to infants to prevent the development of peanut allergy. These are the type of results the American people can expect from supporting NIH (NIAID, NHLBI and NIEHS) and their medical research mission.

ACAAI and AAAAI call on Congress to continue its bi-partisan support for the NIH and the NIAID, NHLBI and NIEHS as it completes the 2017 appropriations process and embarks on enacting appropriations bills for fiscal year 2018.

The American Psychological Association and its affiliated APA Practice Organization sent a letter to congressional leaders stating their opposition to the American Health Care Act after a Congressional Budget Office analysis projected that the bill, if enacted into law, could double the proportion of Americans without health insurance by 2026.

“We believe that any health care reform legislation to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act considered by Congress should increase the number of Americans with coverage for mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment,” said the letter to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., signed by APA President Antonio Puente, PhD, and Interim CEO Cynthia Belar, PhD. “As the recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office concludes, the American Health Care Act would significantly decrease Americans’ access to these services, and by 2026 would take coverage away from an estimated 24 million people who would have otherwise been covered under current law.”

The letter voiced concern that the AHCA would severely undermine Medicaid by instituting per capita caps in federal payments to states that would not keep pace with per enrollee spending growth and by eliminating the Medicaid expansion for Americans with incomes below 138% of the federal poverty level. The CBO projected the AHCA would cut Medicaid spending by $880 billion over the next ten years and remove coverage from 14 million beneficiaries by 2026.

“These cuts are unconscionable in light of the large unmet need for mental and behavioral health and substance use services, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of Americans dying each year due to opioid addiction,” said the letter. “By drastically reducing federal spending for Medicaid, and by removing the requirement that Medicaid benchmark plans cover mental health, substance use, and behavioral health services, the American Health Care Act would jeopardize coverage for these life-saving treatments for the entire Medicaid population.”

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Explosive allegations rising from a California lawsuit charge that Big Agra corporate giant Monsanto used ghost writers to created research the company used to win federal approval of glyphosate, the weed-killer in Monsanto’s market-leading Roundup™ herbicide.

With the EPA poised for massive cuts under the new administration, the litigation reveals problems calling for stronger, rather than weaker, enforcement powers for the agency created by Republican Richard M. Nixon.

The disclosure comes just as a federal court upheld a law mandating their product carry a cancer warning.

Agrochemical giant Monsanto used ghostwriters on scientific reports to cover up the risk of cancer from its flagship weedkiller, plaintiffs in a case in a U.S. Federal Court in San Francisco have claimed in a lawsuit.

Lawyers suing Monsanto on behalf of farmers and others in the mass litigation presented documents to the court claiming that the company had failed to warn the public that exposure to its most popular weedkiller, Roundup, was known to cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer. Roundup is the most-used weed killer in history.

Employes at the company were accused of writing reports that were used to determine if one of the key ingredients in Roundup, glyphosate, was not carcinogenic. The company’s toxicology manager is accused of ghostwriting sections of a scientific report in 2013 under the names of other scientists and another manager was seen to ghostwrite sections of another report from 2000.

On the back of the false reports, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency deemed that Roundup posed no cancer risk. The company has denied that it carried out such activities and says that the claims the allegations are based on “cherry-pick” from one email.

In the email in question, an executive from the company said that ghostwriters could help cut down on costs and researchers “would just edit & sign their names so to speak.”

While court filings said that the EPA “may be unaware of Monsanto’s deceptive authorship practice,” former deputy director of the EPA, Jess Rowland, was accused of colluding with Monsanto to bury the real scientific research on glyphosate and its links to cancer.

Citing an email from a Monsanto employee, Roland reportedly said, “If I can kill this (the study) I should get a medal.” Rowland has been the central figure in more than 20 lawsuits in the U.S.

In a separate lawsuit, a district court ruled that California could classify glyphosate as a cancer risk. The World Health Organization had previously upgraded glyphosate as a carcinogen.